NEW RELEASES
Excuse me if I laugh.
The roads are dark and large books block our path.
The air we breathe is made of evening air.
The world is longer than the road that brings us here.
Bill Manhire's new book begins with the song of an extinct bird — the huia —and journeys on into troubling futures. These poems reach for the possibilities of lyric, even as their worlds are being threatened in a range of agitating ways. In the title poem we hear a baby say Wow to life and to the astonishing prospect of language; but almost immediately we hear the world reply: Also. Along the way there are several desperate jokes.
>>4 poems.
A man calls one afternoon with a shattering message for Lucy: his wife has been having an affair with Lucy's husband, he wants her to know. The revelation marks a turning point. Lucy and Jake decide to stay together, but in a special arrangement designed to even the score and save their marriage: she will hurt him three times. Jake will not know when the hurt is coming, nor what form it will take. As the couple submit to a delicate game of crime and punishment, Lucy herself begins to change, surrendering to a transformation of both mind and body from which there is no return.
"The Harpy is brilliant. Hunter imbues the everyday with apocalyptic unease. A deeply unsettling, excellent read." —Daisy Johnson
Farrell has published four collections of poetry over 25 years, from Cutting Out (1987) to The Broken Book (2011). Nouns, Verbs, etc. collects the best work from these books, and intersperses them with other poems thus far 'uncollected'.
Those who cannot sleep are the only ones who do not take sleep for granted. For the insomniac, every detail of their lives is seen in relation to their insomnia. Harvey's insomnia came upon her without warning. This is the poetic and insightful account of how she spent a year under its dominance.
Lo-TEK: Design by radical indigenism by Julia Watson $110
In an era of high-tech and climate extremes, we are drowning in information while starving for wisdom. Enter Lo-TEK, a design movement rebuilding indigenous philosophy and vernacular architecture to generate sustainable, resilient infrastructure and design solutions that are eco-positive.
"Can ancient fixes save our crisis-torn world? This book is the result of a decade of travelling to some of the most remote regions on the planet, interviewing anthropologists, scientists and tribe members. Watson carefully documented their indigenous innovations using the landscape architect's language of plans, cross-sections and exploded isometric diagrams to explain clearly how they work." —The Guardian
An anthology of writing and art to celebrate the diversity of New Zealand's cultures, produced in response to the 2019 Christchurch terrorist attacks.
Completely fascinating and occasionally useful.
The daughter of a Buddhist priest, Tsuneno was born in 1804 in a rural Japanese village and was expected to live a life much like her mother's. But after three divorces — and with a temperament much too strong-willed for her family's approval — she ran away to make a life for herself in one of the largest cities in the world: Edo (present-day Tokyo). This book intimates life in Edo just before the arrival of Commodore Matthew Perry's fleet, which would open Japan up to trade and diplomacy with the West for the first time. During this pivotal moment in Japanese history, Tsuneno bounces from tenement to tenement, marries a masterless samurai and eventually ends up in the service of a famous city magistrate.
When a young British man asks his German grandfather what it was like to fight on the wrong side of the war, the question is initially met with irritation and silence. But after the old man's death, a long letter to his grandson is found among his things. That letter is this book. In it, he relates the experiences of an unlikely few days on the Eastern Front — at a moment when he knows not only that Germany is going to lose the war, but that it deserves to. He writes about his everyday experience amid horror, confusion and bravery, and he asks himself what responsibility he bears for the circumstances he found himself in. As he tries to find an answer he can live with, we hear from his grandson what kind of man he became in the seventy years after the war.
"A remarkable and audacious novel that is harrowingly real and, at the same time, asks the most searching questions about men at war." —William Boyd
Can trauma be inherited? Halberstadt's travels into his own heritage to answer this question. In Ukraine he tracks down his paternal grandfather — apparently the last living bodyguard of Joseph Stalin — to reckon with the ways in which decades of Soviet totalitarianism shaped and fractured three generations of his family. He returns to Lithuania, his Jewish mother's home, to revisit the legacy of the Holocaust and the pernicious anti-Semitism that remains largely unaccounted for, learning that the boundary between history and biography is often fragile and indistinct. And he visits his birthplace, Moscow, where his glamorous grandmother designed homespun couture for Soviet ministers' wives, his mother dosed dissidents at a psychiatric hospital, and his father made a living by selling black-market jazz and rock records. Finally, Halberstadt explores his own story — that of a fatherless immigrant who arrived in America, to a housing project in Queens, New York, as a ten-year-old boy struggling with identity, feelings of rootlessness and a yearning for home. He comes to learn that he was merely the latest in a lineage of sons who grew up alone, separated from their fathers by the tides of politics and history.
In January 2002, a group of suspected terrorists were transferred to a Naval Base in Guantanamo, Cuba. They were the first of hundreds of men who would be held there—and 40 still remain. These prisoners were characterized as the "worst of the worst" but many of them have never been properly charged or tried in a proper court, and have been denied due process. The Guantanamo Bay detention camp is a place that most Americans would rather not think about. But the stories of the people whose lives have been shaped by Guantanamo deserve to have their stories heard. In the graphic novel Guantanamo Voices, journalist Sarah Mirk and her team of diverse artists tell the stories of ten people who spent time at the prison, including service members, prisoners, lawyers, and journalists.
Why does archaeology matter? How does studying prehistory help us understand climate change? How can archaeological discoveries challenge contemporary assumptions about gender? How has archaeology been used and misused to support political and nationalist agendas — and how can it help build a more diverse and inclusive picture of our world by examining the people left out of written history?
The Pōrangi Boy by Shilo Kino $25
Awful, but fascinating. The book is filled with photographs (and maps!) giving insight into period crime and detection, from phrenology to fingerprints, 1811—1911.
Twelve-year-old Niko lives in Pohe Bay, a small, rural town with a sacred hot spring and a taniwha named Taukere. The government wants to build a prison over the home of the taniwha, and Niko's grandfather is busy protesting. People call him pōrangi, crazy, but when he dies, it's up to Niko to convince his community that the taniwha is real and stop the prison from being built. With help from his friend Wai, Niko must unite his whanau, honour his grandfather and stand up to his childhood bully.
Fancy Dancing: New and selected poems, 2007—2020 by Bernadette Hall $30
Her eleventh collection. "As close as I’ll ever get to writing an autobiography."
Community-positive large-flavoured vegetarian recipes drawing from McKinnon's Chinese-Australian heritage.
>>Other cookbooks by Hetty McKinnon.
Graham Bennett: Around Every Circle by Graham Bennett, Felicity Milburn, Rosa Shiels, John Freeman-Moir, Barbara Speedy $85
This exquisite book from award-winning art publisher Ron Sang records the career to date of this important New Zealand sculptor and intimates his approaches, environmental concerns and working practices.